You will find the exhibition Prehistories at the ground floor.
Walk through the earliest history, long before Sweden as we know it today existed. You will meet various people, read about their fates and see artefacts from the places where they lived.
The woman from Barum
One of the oldest known women in Sweden was buried one spring day about 9,000 years ago at Barum (Bäckaskog) in Skåne. During the ceremony she was placed in a pit with her legs drawn up and her hands in front of her breast, just as you see her now. When excavated in 1939, she was taken for a man at first, because the grave contained hunting weapons. But skeletal analyses by osteologists (bone experts) later disproved this. Modern excavations have revealed that women at that time often went hunting and fishing, as well as gathering. In this exhibition you will also meet an elderly man and a small child who lived in the 6th millennium BC at Skateholm, east of the town Trelleborg.
They were buried together. The man lies as if sleeping, facing the child, who has been powdered with red ochre, which archaeologists take to be a symbol of life.
“The woman from Barum” (formerly “Bäckaskogskvinnan”) Skåne, Kiaby (Barum), around 7000 BC. Reconstruction to the left, SHM 22438
Later on in early agricultural communities people’s need of communal monuments and memorials was clearly testified. Selected individuals were buried in large stone chamber tombs. You can find such a grave from western Sweden on display here. The grave is a passage tomb in which over a hundred people were buried in the course of 800 years, between about 3500 and 2700 BC, making about two persons per generation. More permanent, agricultural settlement enabled people to accumulate more material wealth. Pottery in many forms and with many different kinds of decoration became popular, not only as storage, cooking vessels and “tableware” but also as a manifestation of social standing.
The world in Sweden
Contacts with the outside world were steadily intensified from the 3rd millennium BC onwards. This can be seen from the possessions of an upper class which became established in the 18th century BC. They were buried in great barrows (tumuli), in keeping with the ideals of the new age, along with jewellery and weapons of bronze and gold. The male grave goods included swords, which were an innovation. The objects were often big and flashy, richly decorated with spirals and abstract patterning. The wealth of this upper class was probably based on control of metal imports; no metals were extracted in Scandinavia itself. The social structure which now came into being has, in various forms, survived well into historical times. The artefacts you see in the exhibition were status symbols betokening power and affluence, and some of them were sacrificed to gods and goddesses. They have been found in bogs and lakes.
The art of bronze casting came to Scandinavia in about 1800-1700 BC, and traces have been unearthed on many settlement sites. You can see clay crucibles, for melting copper and tin, as well as soapstone casting moulds. Aside from metals, the population went on using stone, wood and horn for making its implements and other artefacts all through prehistory.
Rock carvings
People communicated with each other, and probably also with the gods, through a pictorial language, rock carvings. These are to be found on many outcrops in the landscape or on boulders, like the one shown here, from Öland. The boulder shows horse-like animals and a ship with people on board. At the very top you see a circular figure, and at the sides a large number of tiny cavities (cup marks) have been gouged out. The circular figure is usually taken to be a solar symbol, while the cup marks are believed to have had a more general magical significance.
Boulder with rock carvings, Öland, Smedby, 1700-1100 BC. SHM 15695
Real writing, in the form of runes, can be seen on the stones from Blekinge and Gotland. Runic script goes back nearly 2,000 years. It is believed to have been inspired by the Latin alphabet, buts its alphabetical order is quite different, suggesting that runes were devised at some distance from the Roman Empire, perhaps in south Scandinavia.
Influences from the Roman Empire
Next to the stones you see a young woman’s burial from Gårdlösa in Skåne. She wore a silver fibula (costume pin) with the name “ek unwodz” (I Unvodz) scribed in runes on the back. We do not know whom this name refers to – perhaps the young woman, perhaps the person who made the fibula, or perhaps the fibula itself? This woman lived in the 3rd century, contemporary with a man also buried in Skåne, in Öremölla. Both of them belonged to a privileged social class influenced by the technology, art and fashion of the Roman Empire. Roman influences extended well beyond the confines of the Empire itself, all the way up to Scandinavia.
The Öremölla man had adopted a Roman lifestyle. He was buried with a complete Roman drinking set of bronze, comprising serving vessels, a ladle and wine strainers. The two drinking glasses in the service are of superb quality and were probably made by an Egyptian or Syrian glassblower.
Figurative art now superseded the more abstract decoration of preceding ages, showing an abundance of fabulous beasts, not all of them readily understandable. Look at the magnificent relief brooches which adorned women’s costumes in the 5th and 6th centuries and were found in Jämtland, Hälsingland and Uppland.
Housing
The hall was the principal room of dwelling houses, rather like our present-day living room, and it became an especially important social venue from the 5th century onwards. There you could flaunt your opulence and social standing and give generous banquets. Food was important. Large iron cauldrons were suspended on stout chains over the great hearth. One such pot is shown here, with iron forks and an exclusive bronze plate beside it. Kitchen equipment like this could accompany the upper class in death, for use in the life hereafter.
At these banquets, people played board games and musicians entertained them on the lyre. This was the kind of milieu frequented by an aristocrat from Uppland, whose weapons and ornamental helmet were masterpieces made by skilled craftsmen. A similar life was led by an upper-class woman from Öland. Her grave gifts included a large bead necklace. Those artefacts are now fragments only, the dead woman having been cremated on a funeral pyre. Both these people lived in the 8th century, and finds from their burials are on display here.
The hall was also a setting for religious rites and the telling of myths and sagas. You can see small, partly gilded male fertility f igurines, and miniature gold foils of couples kissing, unearthed in Södermanland and Uppland. Perhaps the kissing gold foil figures represent Frey, the god of love, and the giantess Gerd, both of them figures of Old Norse mythology.
